Phonetic Transcription

Phonetic transcription in its most general sense is the recording of aspects of pronunciation by any written means. In phonetics, however, it refers to the use of specialized notation systems for representing the phonetic content of speech. Apart from the central role such systems have in the study of phonetics, there are a number of reasons why practitioners of various professions employ phonetic transcription. Foreign language dictionaries and teaching texts need to be able to instruct learners how to pronounce words when sound-spelling correspondences are ambiguous (e.g., <oo> in book, boot, blood) or inconsistent (e.g., cite, site, sight). Linguists carrying out fieldwork want to be able to write down their consultants’ speech with enough precision that other linguists can read it and recover the pronunciations ...